


Devil's Lighthouse

by AliasBoomer



Category: Devil's Lighthouse, The Correspondents, music/band
Genre: Character Death, Drinking & Talking, Driving and Talking, F/M, Sexual Tension, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:53:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25706212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliasBoomer/pseuds/AliasBoomer
Summary: A man who has been watching a woman from afar and made a plan to connect with her, based off of the song Devil's Lighthouse by The Correspondents.
Kudos: 2





	1. The Bar

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Devil's Lighthouse](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/661177) by The Correspondents. 



Tonight’s the night. All the preparations have been made, and now, here she is. She’s beautiful, as always. Dressed casually, her hair down, in a black blouse under a loose grey sweater. She’s sitting at the end of the bar, turned so her back is to the wall, reading a book as she sips her bourbon. From this, he knows this is a night she’s here alone, a night she will be unlikely to welcome intrusions beyond a little banter from the bartender as she orders her next round.  
He was hoping for a night like this because he knows his gambit is so high risk that it doesn’t matter if she’s receptive to his initial approach. It’s more important to be assured that they won’t be interrupted. He chooses to think it’s a good sign that this is her mood on the first night that he’s ready to act on his plan.  
He pulls out the high bar chair directly next to hers, she doesn’t look up from her page. He knows she is aware of his presence and is intentionally signaling her lack of concern or interest.  
“Excuse me, Jordan. I would like to make a wager with you.”  
They have never spoken before, so the choice to address her by name is an opening salvo of his strategy. He is wagering that behaviors that would most often make a woman feel threatened and uncomfortable will not scare her. That she will take it as a dare, a game of social chicken. If he is wrong in that base assumption his entire plan is for nothing. No point shying away from discovering if there’s a fundamental fatal error in his hopes.  
Her only answer gives him no reason to doubt his premise. She holds up one finger to him without speaking, continuing to read her book. He settles himself a little more comfortably in his chair. The moment stretches on. He knows that it’s only a minute or two but he forces himself not to check the time. She’s testing him, showing impatience would lower his score. Finally, an agonized eternity later, she pulls a book mark out from the pages she already finished, places it in her current spot, puts her book down, and looks up at him, raising one eyebrow.  
“This better be good.”  
He pulls a small folded over bundle of large bills out of his breast pocket where he has staged it behind the pocket square for this moment, and places it on the bar.  
“Part of the wager is that if you deem me to have wasted your time, I give this to Frank to cover your tab. I figure it should buy your drinks for at least a month or two.”  
“Alright, I’m listening.” He thinks he detects a note of amusement in her voice, but her expression betrays nothing.  
He’s brought his own drink over with him and he takes a long, slow sip, hoping that he appears to be making her wait as she did to him. Actually he’s covering for an overwhelming urge to gulp nervously before he dives all the way into this utterly deranged interaction. He’s thought of little else for so long.  
If he’s completely and brutally honest with himself he doesn’t actually hope his nerves are covered. He hopes she sees through him like the glass he hides behind.  
“I am going to tell you things I have guessed about you. Then, I am going to make you an offer. If my guesses are wrong, or they or my offer make you uncomfortable, or if I just don’t hold your attention, all you have to do is tell me to stop and I will leave. I will give this to Frank,” A finger taps the bundled cash, “and I will never set foot back in this bar. We will, more than likely, never be in the same room again for the rest of our lives.”  
“And if I like your guesses, and your offer?” He is thrilled by the curiosity in her voice. It’s a good sign she’s humored him even this far. He continues to stare into his glass as he raises the stakes.  
“Then we’ll leave together to go do the one thing in the world that will make you happiest.” She doesn’t immediately respond and he can’t bring himself to look at what, if anything, is visible of her emotions in her face. The moment sits, heavy. A million miles away on the other side of the room, a loud party clatters in. Their laughter and conversation spike the ambient noise level, but the tension in this quiet corner is insulating.  
“You realize most women would think you’re incredibly creepy?” She still sits with her back to the wall, his chair faces the bar, he is twisted so his torso faces her even as his eyes stay lowered.  
“I do. That’s why I’m making a wager of it. Humoring me has risk, so I’ll risk money and never coming back to my favorite bar.”  
“And you realize that this sounds like a bad line? Or a cry for help?”  
“My first guess is that while most women would quite reasonably see my behavior that way, you-” He meets her eyes “-are fascinated and hoping I can pull it off.” She’s staring at him. Her expression is neutral at first glance, but something in her eyes and mouth say to him that she’s very carefully not showing some sort of strong emotion. “Should I stop?”  
“No.”  
“Alright. I also guess that you are lonely. I watch you. I know you know that. I don’t think you know how much.” She just keeps looking him in the eye. Most people won’t look each other directly in the eye for long. It’s awkward, it’s vulnerable, it’s scary. Her gaze doesn’t flinch. Neither does his. There was a slight smile when he told her he knew she knew he watched, but it was controlled again in a fraction of an instant. “You have plenty of friends. People you talk frankly and easily to, people you laugh with, people who adore you. You have no shortage of dates, men and women. You date men more, but you don’t date anyone seriously. You pretend to only be interested in casual relationships because you haven’t found anyone who can give you what you really want and you’re sick of lowering your standards.” The slightest expression again. Eyes ever so slightly widened, quickly repressed startlement. “You present such a controlled face to the world because you feel things very very deeply, and you are incredibly honest. The world doesn’t take kindly to these things, especially in combination.”  
Her eyes move to something behind him and she holds up a finger again. The bartender is approaching to ask if they’d like refills in a carefully casual tone. Frank doesn’t look at him, or the money on the counter. He knows that if Jordan gives the least indication, Frank will drive him off for her. She is friendly with most of the bartenders here. She’s a regular, a good tipper, and charming. He is here frequently as well, but they don’t love him like they love her. Even if they didn’t love her here, Frank at the very least would chase off anyone he though might be pestering someone in his bar.  
Jordan says she’d love another Maker’s, rocks. She’ll be buying for him as well. He thanks her, but tells Frank he’d like some water, he’ll be driving soon. Reassured by Jordan’s ease and her obvious signal that she has the situation in hand, he pours her drink, hands over the water, and heads back to the front of the mostly empty bar.  
“I would like you to continue, but first, you haven’t introduced yourself.” Her eyes are back on his and he can feel his heart beat speeding up. “This is beginning to be a conversation I don’t want to have with a stranger. Who are you.” Grammatically this last should be a question. But a question invites an answer. This is not an invitation, it is a command.  
“My name is Tyler Merrin, I am 33 years old, I work in the accounting department of Dynam Industries in the office tower up the block and I live in an apartment off Main, between State and Zimmerman.”  
“Cute.” There a quirk of annoyance to her lips. “I appreciate the information I would send a friend to pass on to the cops before a first date. But you’re making some very personal... guesses, about who I am on an intimate level. I’m intrigued, but if I’m going to listen to more and let you build up to an offer of my ultimate happiness-” she over enunciates the syllables of those two words, a little aggressive. He hopes it’s just because she’s irritated to feel hopeful, not that he’s making her angry with his presumptions. “-then I need to know who you are.”  
“I…. am lonely.” He can’t bring himself to face her regard for this. Laying himself out for her judgement is a very different vulnerability than gambling on his judgements about her. He addresses his untouched water glass. “Not in the same way as you. People don’t adore me. I haven’t been unusually blunt with you, I’m just like this. People think it’s funny in small doses. I have positive acquaintances, coworkers, people I share activities with. But no one adores me, and I don’t laugh easily with anyone. I’ve eavesdropped on a lot of your conversations. I know it’s rude, but I do it anyway. You told a friend once that when you care about someone, when you want someone, you don’t know what it is that they see in your eyes, but it scares them. I think it’s your honesty, and I can’t imagine ever wanting to look away from something like that.” Putting truth to the words he looks up at her and sees her face unguarded for a moment. Before she snaps back into the face she shows to men she doesn’t trust yet, he sees gratitude in her small smile and vulnerability in her eyes. She clamps it back down quickly, but it gives him a rush like the big dip on a roller coaster, and he takes a swig of his water to keep from ruining the game by grinning like an idiot for having won that smile. He needs to look as impassive as he can until she trusts him with more.  
“Alright, Tyler. You claim to know what will make me happy.” She’s resolved. He’s close to convincing her. He’ll be able to make her the offer soon. “Why do you think you know that?”  
“Like I said Jordan, I watch you, and I eavesdrop on you. It’s not the same as interacting, but I bet I know you better than some of the people who get to do that. I know that you don’t look past homeless people like they aren’t there the way most people do, and the quickest I’ve seen someone lose all your respect was for criticizing you for that. I know you like cats and dogs equally and think anyone who tries to make them opposed concepts is being stupid. I know you can talk circles around people on philosophy but you despise the kind of intellectual pissing contest such things devolve to more often than not. I know you love to dance, you loved working in theatre but hated too many of the people, and you fiercely believe that our systems are broken and there is a moral obligation to fix them. You like seducing more than being seduced, you like chocolate with peanut butter, you like really bad horror movies. And I know the books you love the most. You read a lot. But you love fantasy novels with female protagonists, especially ones with dragons. They’re the only books you read upside down. I think it’s to make them last you longer?” Her face is no longer impassive, but he’s not sure what it’s showing. He briefly worries that he’s pushed too far and she is alarmed.  
“You listen to my conversations and notice which books I read.” She looks away from him this time, to look down at her drink. “The bartenders warned me about you staring at me months ago. I’d noticed it for myself before that.” Her eyes snap back up before she asks, “How long have you actually been watching me?”  
He takes a deep breath. She’s been humoring him, she’s been intrigued by him. If she’s worried about his obsession, this will definitely drive her to fear him, hate him, want him to leave.  
“I came to this bar exactly twenty three months ago last week.” That sentence took so much effort to force out, he needs a deep drink of his water before he can bring himself to say more. “You were wearing a white dress covered in purple and yellow flowers that swirled when you moved. When you were laughing with your friends I noticed you and thought you were beautiful. When none of your friends were looking, I saw how blank your face went. You were surrounded by happy people, and you looked lonely. At first I tried not to watch you, but I don’t like to lie to myself. The nights we were both here nothing else mattered.”  
“Why haven’t you approached me before?”  
“I wanted to do it right.”  
“Is that why you’re dressed different?” Her eyes deliberately trace his body down and up again, and he feels his face heat up.  
“Partly. Do you like it?”  
She leans toward him a little.  
“You tell me?”  
Just a few inches closer, but it goes to his head more than anything he’s drunk could.  
“You don’t seem to have a strong ‘type’, but you do seem more excited about your partners who put effort into their appearance, whatever that looks like.” He shifts his body so that their legs press together and though he doesn’t close any more distance it makes the proximity more intense. “You love this suit. The waistcoat is a bit much, but you’ll take it because the color is great.”  
“You don’t sound like you’re making guesses any more.” Now she’s smiling, only a little, but not stopping herself.  
“If you haven’t told me to fuck off by now, you’re not going to.”  
“Does that mean we’re at the point where you make me that offer?”  
“Almost. You had too much to drink one night. You went on a tear about how there weren’t enough mysteries left in the world. You said that if more people spent time out on the ocean, with nothing but the turbulent seas to anchor them against the stars, people would be more honest with themselves.” He can see in her eyes that he is right. He’s been right. Fear gripped him stronger than anything he’d ever felt when he started this conversation. Fear that he’d guessed wrong, that he was out of line, and he’d make her feel unsafe, that what he dreamed about her wants was just a dream, that he would be wrong and have done harm and even his fantasies would be lost to him. But he’s right. “Come with me, tonight, right now, to Devil’s Isle." The words hang there. "Please.”  
He knows not to push any further as she looks back down to her half finished drink and thinks.  
“You want me to drive over an hour out of town, after dark, on a weeknight, with a man I just met, to go to an isolated and ominously named place, where there’s basically nothing?”  
“Basically but not entirely nothing. I have the keys to the Devil’s Lighthouse.”  
“That… is worse, actually.”  
“Is it?”  
“It should be.”  
She looks back up at him. For the first time in the conversation he feels like the charge in their eye contact is in his favor.  
“I know that it’s a long drive in the dark with a virtual stranger. I know that you’re going to do it anyway, work tomorrow be damned.”  
She slams the last of her drink.  
“You’re driving.”


	2. The Car

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having convinced the girl of his dreams to leave the bar with him, a man tries to keep his cool on the long drive to an isolated lighthouse.

The head-lights split the darkness like there’s nothing in the world outside what their sharp white beams touch. A reality made only of the ghosts of half seen trees, winding asphalt, the car they lead, and the people inside.  
Before leaving the bar Jordan had picked up the money and slipped it back into Tyler’s pocket, her hand lingering slightly in the physical contact, tantalizing. Then she’d moved past him and waved down the bartender. She’d repeated to Frank the information about Tyler’s name and place of work and residence, and that he was taking her out to Devil’s Lighthouse. Frank started to ask if she was sure but she cut him off, saying she was dumb enough to do this, but not dumb enough to do it without anyone knowing, and should she never be seen or heard from again it was officially Frank’s job to see that Tyler suffered for it. Frank looked at Tyler, unsure if he should be trying to intimidate him or feeling sorry for him. Tyler had smiled slightly and shrugged a little to show he wasn’t sure either. She used the bar’s restroom while he settled his tab, and then they were off.  
When they got to the car he’d appointed her DJ for the trip and handed her the folder of CDs. She’d been careful making her selection. Silent and focused for most of the time it took him to navigate to the highway and begin putting the city behind them.  
Finally she settled on something with a heavy driving beat and high energy, then she’d set the volume low and turned to stare at him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the road for long. In a way that made her gaze easier to bear, a cowardly reprieve to have something else demanding his attention. It also made it worse, the one sided observation that had been between them so long forcibly reversed.  
The miles stretched on, the music faded in and out of his awareness, while the silence and weight of her regard continued to build up pressure. Finally she spoke, and he had to bite back a gasp of relief.  
“What is it that you want out of this little field trip?”  
“Well, I brought a basket with some wine and food. I thought we could climb to the top and spend time with the ocean. I would love to talk to you. Learn about you first hand instead of watching. If you want to do more, there’s that, but I really just want to be with you.”  
“Do more. So, you want to fuck?”  
He knows she’s being abrasively direct about it to get a rise out of him. Even if he wanted to conceal his reaction, he’s quite sure any light at all would show the flush rising to his face. He can feel the heat, constant traitor to any effort at presenting a collected front under pressure. He’s never been any good at bluffing.  
“I… would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it, didn’t want it. But I don’t want anything to happen that feels pressured for you. I’m not taking you here to make you indebted to me or anything like that.”  
“I appreciate your concerns. Anything I do tonight I do because I choose it, not because I’m pressured.” He can’t quite read the emotions underlying her words, but her statements are confident and firm. “That’s not blanket permission to barrel ahead with whatever you want, but don’t waste both our time worrying about pressuring me. I’m here because I want to be.”  
He sees out of the corner of his eye that she’s shifted and feels the pressure of her gaze lessen, but he still nearly jumps out of his skin when the car window lowers a crack, filling the space with cold howling wind just as they swing around a curve and catch sight of their goal through a gap in the trees.  
The thick pale tower rises from a spit of land connected by a narrow bridge. Scattered clouds and light pollution in the city have given way to a stunningly clear night out here in the middle of no where, the depths of the star-studded darkness beyond the coast immense and breath taking. The brilliant light flashes from the dark metal enclosure capping the structure, and then the view is obscured again.  
A moment later she closes the window, the absence of wind and sound is almost as deafening. A dance track on the sound system valiantly beats back the silence, adding a surreal feeling. He risks a glance at her and sees her breathe deeply while the car is still full of fresh air, scented with the sea and the foliage.  
That quick glimpse of her blissful expression is just as alluring as her earlier flirtatious contact, just as intimate, but in a completely different way. This is what he hoped for from this evening. Just as much as the chemistry in the brief touches and charged looks stokes his hope for sexual intimacy, the openness in her face as she enjoys a simple pleasure stokes his hope of knowing her intimately in a less prurient sense. The swell of hope is almost painful in it’s intensity.  
“Do you always go to such... lengths to impress a girl?”  
“I’ve never done anything like this before.”  
“So why are you doing it now? For me?”  
The pause drags on as he tries to find words for something wordless. “There are… a hundred things I could say.” Finally he gives up and tries to talk around a concept he can’t seem to define. “Your eyes, your smile, your wit. The way you always seem to know what to say and how to say it. To shift the mood of your conversations how you want them. The way the three little moles on the back of your neck are somehow perfect. The fact that you’re so completely unobtainable, friendly and engaged but just out of reach of everyone around you. These are all reasons but none of them are why. You’ve been… stuck in my head. Ever since I first laid eyes on you. Like a song with no words and no melody that just won’t go away. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything as much as I want to be close to you. I think I would give up everything, my entire life, if that was what it took.”  
“You’ve never felt this way before? There’s not some string of ex-girlfriends you stalk-charmed who’d be rolling their eyes right now?”  
“Everyone else I’ve tried to date would probably be convinced I’d suffered a traumatic brain injury by now. I’m not like this. I’m never like this. This passion, this need to go out on a limb, this is a completely different me than anyone else in my life knows.” The words are spoken as quickly as thought and as he hears them he is struck. “Maybe that’s why. No one and nothing else brings this out in me.” He flicks his eyes to her face. “I want to be this version of me always.”  
“Always, huh?” She’s smiling. His eyes are back on the road, but he knows it without having to see it. “That’s a pretty big ask. Let’s focus on tonight, shall we?”  
The road has curved again and their destination is back in view. The light swinging around and around has a hypnotic weight, calling them to it despite its intended purpose being to warn away. She doesn’t speak again until the car is rolling to a stop before the gate at the end of the bridge.  
“Let me.”  
She holds out her hand, he digs the key ring that light house maintenance was convinced to lend him from his jacket pocket and passes it over.  
She slips out of the car, the door closes and he’s alone for a moment. He fights the urge to slap or pinch himself. The thrill he’s felt from her proximity recedes, leaving a sort of dream-like quality in its wake. They’re really here. They’re really doing this. He asked her to come with him and she did. The gate swings open and she turns to face him, shielding her eyes from the glare of the headlights with an upraised hand. He drives through and she pulls the gate closed and locks it behind them. Then she’s back in the car, her face brightened by the chill and they’re rolling across the bridge to Devil’s Isle.  
A few short moments and they’re parking near the lighthouse door. She still has the keys and she heads for the building while he gets the basket and blanket for the picnic. He also grabs the small bag of other supplies. Just in case.  
Passing around the car with his burdens he’s just in time to see the door open and Jordan’s figure disappear into the dark opening. He takes one last deep breath of the calming fresh air and follows.


	3. The Lighthouse (B)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A man has invited a woman he has admired from afar to go with him to an isolated lighthouse, where she gets what she wants.

In the old days it was easier. Humans knew much less about the world, but what they knew sat deeper. Thousands of facts and details about the interrelation of things and the laws behind them have created a shield, a comfort, a complacency. Now, when a human looks out into the darkness of the night or the vastness of the sea and shudders, they’re more likely to discount the feeling, to laugh themself off and turn back to a thick layer of distraction with which they insulate themselves from the knowledge of their relative smallness.  
It made the job of the sirens almost impossible and they’d had to adapt. Human lives were still needed to feed the vast deep maw of their mother. Lives, not necessarily bodies. When men flung themselves from their ships at the sound of their song, it wasn’t the meat that was gladly devoured. There is a power in a mortal choosing of their own free will to take the siren’s deal. Legends would tell you that the offer is sex, or maybe love, or that they offer nothing at all, just pull those who hear them mindlessly in. This is not true. The offer is comprehensible only in the moment when it is made to you. To be embraced fully by their mother is a sensation that makes the painful insignificance of individuality disappear. Something beyond pleasure, beyond thought, an experience that will leave no room for loneliness or pain or doubt.  
All it costs is everything you are.  
For many that is a deal happily accepted, but now humans are so caught up in the complications they’ve created they can’t even hear the offer. At least, not if a siren is silly enough to sit on a rock out at sea shouting her lungs out. The offer now must be made much more subtly. There are still humans who can hear it, but the sirens must go to them.  
There will always be those who can’t, for all their efforts, truly drown out the voice that whispers of the vastness of the night and the insignificance of the self. There will always be those who can feel the pull of what the siren offers, those who will eagerly make the choice to feed the depths in exchange for that one moment of true bliss. But they are no longer best found in rowdy batches staffing ships right outside their many-limbed mother’s cove. Now her daughters must perfect human disguises and go into human spaces. The lonely, the eager, are easy to find if one knows where to look.  
So it is that one who has been hunting for a long time without success finds herself bemusedly watching her prey as he shows more eagerness than she’s found in centuries. If she’s honest with herself, her lack of victims hasn’t been because there were none available. None of her sisters tend to settle as long in a human disguise as she does, they flit about nipping from the edges of the herd, barely bothering with names much less lives to hide themselves. But the siren who has been calling herself Jordan has had a feeling in her gut for a long time that something is wrong with that kind of sacrifice. When a ship could be counted on to disgorge more than half its crew every couple of years, that brief delirious dive was Choice enough to give Mother what she needed. But she’s grown lethargic as the centuries pass and her daughters have struggled to feed her. The impoverished, addicted, displaced, and desperate may be the easiest to lure, but those who have long since been deprived of most choices with any meaning in their lives seem reasonably to be a poor source of the Choice that keeps an eternal mind fed. Chasing this hunch, ‘Jordan’ has been weaving a call more subtle than her sisters, as different from what they do now as their new song is from the original.  
She’s excited and almost perturbed at her level of success.  
Many of the passing lovers she’s held in the years she’s spent feigning mortality could have been used to test her theory, and many of the friends as well. But none of them would have made the kind of singular meal she seeks to prove it to herself and the others beyond a doubt. She knows she’ll only have one shot at this. Her sisters will pressure her out of such a time consuming and- to their minds- wasteful strategy if she can’t give them indisputable proof of it’s superiority.  
Also humans track things now, and one can’t exactly stick around after making more than one or two people of one's acquaintance disappear.  
When she picks this special sacrifice she will by necessity be sacrificing her seeming of a human life as well. She’s sought one single soul with a depth of longing above and beyond the common experience. A loneliness so pure that its obliteration will be a mighty and blinding light. How can she throw all she has invested away for less?  
She’d had a small suspicion in the back of her mind about the man who watched her from the corner of the bar. But he always avoided her direct gaze, and it was difficult to examine him properly. And now, here he was, having delivered himself in as neat a package as any of her sisters could have asked for. Of his own accord, he practically begged her to take him into mother’s grasp.  
She stares at him across the small spread of wine and cheese he’s packed up to the top of this ridiculous tower. The bright light swings past above their heads. They are shielded from its glare by the half wall their picnic rests against, and on the other side shielded from the night and the sea by only an open railing of black metal. She hardly knows what they say, talking of life, talking of sex, talking of power and pain. They both know he desires her desperately, but she is giddy with a hope that this is only a veneer over a deeper desire he does not yet comprehend. She says whatever she needs to to keep him distracted from the tension in the air. Her mind is filled with the approach of her mother.  
As the waves below grow wilder she stands, holding a hand down to Tyler. He takes it and allows himself to be pulled up to stand pressed against her. She feels the surge of his heart beat racing. She pushes him until his back is pressed to the windows, her hands find the knot in his cravat and pull it loose. As the light swings around he catches a blindingly lit glimpse of her lips curled fiercely and her eyes full of satisfaction and even though he doesn’t know what the question is, he’s answering it. So when the light swings around again and he sees that beyond the railing the space is no longer empty, only a very small part of him is surprised. More of him is afraid, but not enough. Part of him knows that this is where his fascination has always led, a moth to a flame. Just as much as her beauty or charm, he longed to be close to her danger. She pulls him away from the wall, toward the railing, toward the vast pillars of sucker pocked flesh rising beyond. He doesn’t resist.  
The tip of one massive cephalopodal arm caresses his face with surprising gentleness, and then another is wrapping around his chest and lifting him from his feet. As the light swings around again he hangs level with a massive eye, an immense orb of all pupil, and he feels himself falling into it.  
As she watches him pulled into the darkness she feels her mother’s anticipation and knows that her guesses have been correct. The sustenance gained from a self aware being giving itself over to the blissful unity of being made a piece of the kraken is enhanced by letting the prey make as many as possible of the choices along the way itself. He could never have guessed it would be so literal, but it was the fear as much as the delight that he was chasing and this culmination is nothing he would have asked for and everything he wanted. As his mind and hers are pulled close to the immense and alien awareness, like two satellites in parallel orbits, they are one in a way that physical intimacy could never achieve. His last conscious thought is of satisfaction. As the light winks out inside the little doll of flesh in her grasp, the massive creature tosses it carelessly aside into the water.  
She reaches down to take her daughter into her arms, an old strength nearly forgotten coursing through her immense form. The siren who will no longer be known as Jordan still holds the cravat she had pulled from Tyler's neck. She holds it out to be snatched from her fingers by the wind, then changes her mind, wraps it close about her wrist. Perhaps the symbolism will be lost on her sisters, but she chooses to honor this sacrifice who has helped her find a healthier path.  
He is gone, the very sensation of being truly entirely known and seen and held close to something greater which he had longed for being an experience that requires a cease of individual continuity. But he will be remembered. Mother and daughter think and feel as one, as they have not been able to in long centuries of hunger. Her mind is clearer than it’s been in many years, and it’s time to direct her other children to take their sister’s lead. A few more meals like this and she’ll be feeling quite herself again.  
When his car is found abandoned and his lifeless body washes up on shore, it’s assumed some sort of drunken accident occurred. When her body is never found, it’s assumed to be one of the tragic whims of the sea.  
The ‘death’ of her false identity, designed to lure in lives to consume, is mourned heavily by several large communities. There are multiple wakes, donation drives in her honor, and tearful eulogizing for months.  
His death is marked only by the mourning of his immediate family, twinges of sadness for his circle of acquaintances, and irritation on the part of his employer at having to replace him without notice.


End file.
